Another Year, Another Mother's Day
How can we support mothers instead of just giving them cards and chocolates?
My sister and I weren’t raised to make a big deal of Mother’s Day. Or Father’s Day. Our parents aren’t the most traditional, and neither are we.
As they’ve gotten older, it’s felt more important to get together with them on those designated days. But that’s not because of any pressure on their part. It’s more about an awareness that we have less time left together, coupled with the fact that they’re now living locally instead of all the way across the country. We get together regularly, so why not on those days?
So we do it. But I’m not a fan of Hallmark holidays. I don’t like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day any more than I like Valentine’s Day. In fact, I like them even less.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for celebrating mothers and fathers. But I confess: I have an aversion to being told to do or feel a specific thing on a specific day. And to sentimentality. And to propping up capitalism.
Mother’s Day comes with its own special problem. The day that’s meant for mothers highlights how badly we treat mothers in this country.
For those of you who are mothers and enjoy the day (or anyone else who enjoys it), I don’t mean to rain on your parade. Really. If you get something out of it, I’m happy for you. And I appreciate the idea of taking time to appreciate mothers; they certainly deserve our appreciation.
But it’s not a given that mothers enjoy Mother’s Day any more than the rest of us. Even if they’re all for it, Mother’s Day can be stressful for mothers. Any day that comes with expectations has the potential for those expectations to be dashed. The day can also be stressful for non-mothers, people who wish they were mothers, people with difficult families, grieving mothers, and grieving children — not to mention restaurant workers. Does anyone really like it?
I’m not a mother, so maybe I’m not the best qualified to weigh in. But I recently read articles by two of my favorite contemporary writers who also happen to be mothers, and they both do a good job of calling out some of the biggest issues with Mother’s Day.
Every year, Anne Lamott reposts her article “Why I Hate Mother’s Day” on social media, despite being rewarded with hate mail (seriously, people?). Her reasons for hating the day: It assumes that all mothers are superior to people without children. It reinforces the belief apparently held by most Americans that no one can love like a mother, as if there were limits to or monopolies on love. It also ignores the roles of non-mothers in raising and supporting children.
Even worse, at least in my opinion: “No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior.”
How can one day of enforced emotion and platitudes make up for all the blame laid at mothers’ feet, not to mention all the ways we make life hard for mothers? Shouldn’t mothers be appreciated every day?
But they’re not. It’s ironic that a culture that has gotten so sappy and sentimental about Mother’s Day does very little to actually support mothers — on that day or any other.
In a recent Substack article,
very eloquently juxtaposes the many billions that consumers spend on Mother’s Day with the low pay and lack of opportunities that mothers contend with in the U.S. every day: “Forty-plus years after the Women’s Liberation Movement, mothers are still routinely denied paid family leave, opportunities for promotion, flexible hours, and equal pay.”Mothers, she says, do not need a so-called day off: “Mothers need support from fathers and the childfree to dismantle a patriarchy that still insists the home is the woman’s domain. Mothers need 364 days in which they are not performing four daily hours of unpaid labor to their partners’ two.”
As a person without children, I heartily support this sentiment. I heartily support dismantling the patriarchy; as Kristin Hull notes, “it does not spark joy.” I heartily support creating a new system that works better for all of us — women, men, nonbinary people, and anyone else.
There are so, so many problems with the patriarchy, but here are two big ones for mothers:
1. Mothers earn less than non-mothers (men or women). In the U.S., mothers earn 75 cents for every dollar that fathers earn. That’s even less than women who aren’t mothers, which is already not good. In 2022, women earned 82 cents for each dollar that men earned (up only 2 cents since 2002). Parenthood boosts men’s pay but lowers women’s pay.
In a double whammy, as Kerala Taylor notes, women are “taking on the brunt of our country’s unpaid labor while getting paid less on the job.” That brings us to problem #2:
2. Mothers do more physical and mental housework and childcare than fathers. Though CNN is dead to me, I found this CNN article by David Allan enlightening. He writes that women spend about 3.5 hours more on housework each week than men, “not including errands, grocery shopping or childcare.” Wait, what? How can you not include those huge time-sinks? They’re not housework, but 3.5 hours a week doesn’t begin to cover the disparities between men’s and women’s unpaid home-related work.
To his credit, the author undertook what he calls the “Post-it Note Challenge” with his wife in an attempt to divide their tasks evenly and lighten her load. Much to his dismay, when they each wrote all the tasks they handled on Post-It notes, her pile was way bigger than his! Imagine that.
Add to that the “mental load” of running a household, which falls largely on women and which I feel even in a home without children, and you get an even clearer picture of the inequities that persist in our modern world — a world that may have progressed some since the Middle Ages, but not nearly enough.
Dismantling the patriarchy is a big job. It won’t be done in my lifetime, and it won’t be done by simply revisiting our relationship with Mother’s Day. But the contradictions of Mother’s Day certainly shed some light on the work that lies ahead.
In the meantime, we visited my family for Mother’s Day, and we had a good time. I’m glad we went. We called my mother-in-law in Albuquerque. Facebook was a sea of obligatory Mother’s Day posts; some of them were even interesting and engaging.
We got through another Mother’s Day. Now, what will we do to improve the lives of mothers?
As the mother of the writer of this piece, I totally agree with everything she writes. I hope we all do, and forget celebrating one day that should be celebrated all the time...or not at all. Let's make a list of so many other celebrations that should be discarded forever! Thank you, dear daughter! <3
Well, obviously this resonates with me! Thanks for the shout-out... I'll have to read the Anne Lamott piece, I love her stuff. I told my family this year that the only thing I wanted to do for Mother's Day was go on a long hike and not have anyone complain about it. It was mostly successful!